Until you actually try to go anywhere and find that you cant't without riding through an arterial road with heavy dangerous traffic. The quiet suburban roads don't form a network that allows you to go to actual destinations.
Here in Toronto they are trying to address that by building (a few) cycle tracks running parallel to these horrible arterial roads, but it's still an awful experience. There are a few quiet greenways without any motor traffic, but they don't help you reach any destination.
Neighborhoods that were built before the advent of the car are more amenable to cycling.
Of course the kids need to go outside to meet those other kids (and the other kids need to go out as well), and parents need to let kids out of their sight to go to the park.
These low-density car-dependent suburbs provide a very poor experience for everybody outside a car, from children/teens who can't drive yet to people who are trying to get to a destination (work, shop, library, restaurant, etc.) without a car.
Is there? This is actually a problem. In many neighborhoods, especially in the nicest areas where people are richer, there are fewer and fewer kids. Today, there are significantly fewer kids than adults. Just a few decades ago, kids outnumbered adults in many neighborhoods.
I mean this really matters. If you have a community of 40 families and twenty kids, there's hardly any kids that can actually play with each other. They're probably too different in age, to have groups of more than 2 or 3, and that's a stretch because if you only have two or three there's a significant chance you may not get along / might not be super-interested.
Why not? Mine sure did.
Sounds like Toronto suffers from L.A.'s problem: It's an asinine mess where you're going town a street and then... it dead-ends into a house. It's irritating as shit. None of the streets go anywhere.
Can get some idea of it if you go to Street View and "zoom in" with the mouse wheel.
https://www.google.com/maps/@39.9993331,-78.2406551,3a,15y,9...
In Canada, most towns look 95% alike to this the one you linked, with the exception of a few franchises that don't cross the border. That means I can drop a street view pin in any "neighborhood" that was built in the last decade (often including many mixed-use or more contemporary building types), and more than likely find one giant super grocery, an Orange theory fitness, a Freshii, a Subway, a gas station, a bank, a Tim Hortons, a Starbucks, and at least one mega fucking big parking lot.
I rent a car when I want one for road trips, but after driving through innumerable small towns and cities, it's a sad feeling to visit and just know that... there's literally no good local offerings here, not anymore.
This is 3 minutes outside of Breezewood. This is what urban propagandist dudebros would have you believe is suburban hell: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.0062641,-78.230818,3a,75y,35...
Breezewood isn't even a suburb, less than two hundred people actually live there. It's essentially a rest stop, a bizarro artifact of some esoteric interaction between I-70 and the turnpike. Any other small town in the area is completely different.
> kids don't like growing up in the country
Most do, but if you think yours won't then go live in a small town or a city. Citing Breezewood as a problem with American society is simply idiotic. It's a tiny aberration that doesn't effect you or anybody else except for the handful of weirdos who choose to live there.
If a truck driver stops for the night, but fancies a meal from the other side of the road there's no sidewalk, and no crossing. Just lots of "no pedestrians" signs.
How do you get from the Tesla Supercharger to McDonald's?
In my experience, older children tended to want to congregate at cafes, Einstein Bagels, etc., especially if coming home after school when the parents aren't home and all one wants is a spot for a hanging out with friends over a snack. Also, a park being a gathering place assumes ample tree cover and good weather, missing during most of the the academic year. Meanwhile, at least in the American southwest, a park is unbearably (near 100F) hot in the summer.
I live in the southern US and I don't want to go outside most of the year either, because it's miserable.
And I don't have hard data on hand to back it up but it certainly seems to me and my dad that it's hotter, and more often, than it was when we were kids.
Then I moved to the east coast and, wow, there are visible fault lines from white racists losing Brown v. Board & other civil rights cases in the form of these suburbs built between 1950 and maybe 2000 which have no sidewalks, windy layouts designed to discourage visitors and prevent transit, no public pools but private ones, etc. One of my coworkers lives off of a very busy road which has a sidewalk from their neighborhood which ends abruptly a ¼ mile away in front of the house with the Confederate flag whose owner has gone to every meeting for like 40 years arguing that completing the connection to the park & bus stop will lead to a crime spree. Most of these places had racial covenants in the deeds which are no longer enforceable but definitely set a trend for the formative decades.
(This is not to say that California doesn’t have exclusionary suburbs – I used to ride my bike through some of the ones around San Diego where a Caribbean friend only rode when there was a group to vouch for him after he got tired of explaining to the local police why a black dude was on a nice bike – but they tend to be smaller and less inclined to forgo basic civic infrastructure. Even with that experience I was surprised by how widespread it was in a lot of cities we’ve visited from Florida up to Massachusetts)
Or my guess: you have to drive everywhere. Hence no autonomy for the kids.
"" You can bike around any time you like
But you can never leave ""
- The Eagles, almostSurely if there's a coffee shop within walking distance, it would reduce traffic as people don't have to drive to get coffee?
Completely false. If you have a bunch of small cafes, small scale grocery stores, etc, it brings no traffic. It reduces traffic because now people walk instead of driving to those places. I used to live in a suburb that somehow managed to grandfather in a small convenience store. It was great. I went to the grocery store less because when I ran out of bell peppers I just walked to the store. We drove way less.
Now I live in the inner city a few blocks from a thriving commercial district and there's hardly any cars. I have no idea why people actually believe this. Our neighborhood is pitch silent at night.
Funny, too, because I'd only driven through the place twice but it was still enough of a core memory for me to recognize it right away the first time I'd seen it used in this kind of article.